Issue 17 Laughter Spring 2005

Tears of Laughter

Christopher Turner

­“Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no
difference in the motion of the features,” Leonardo da Vinci wrote in
his posthumousl­y published Treatise on Painting, “either in the
eyes, mouth or cheeks.” With the difference between the­ physical
expression of emoti­ons so subtle, artists had a challenge on their
hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, the “frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary
Magdalen”?

­

To do so, artists relied on a staged iconography of expression and posture, codified in handbooks such as Charles Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions (1667), in which Le Brun adapted Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649)
into a vi­sual lexicon of twenty-four emotions. Here, a menacing
portrayal of the laughing face immediately precedes the illustration of
a crumpled, crying one, almost as if the expressions were modulations
of one another, but with certain differences artificially accentuated,
especially in relation to the ruffling of the brow. Thus Le Brun
created a stylized, histrionic vocabulary of the passions easily
recognizable as tragic or comic on both canvas and stage.

Despite
such expert guidance in the depiction of laughter, in the history of
art there are very few images of people laughing. Le Brun, who was
painter to the king at Versailles, systematized the passions amid an
atmosphere of courtly restraint, as if by categorizing these turbulent
invasions he could tame them. Laughter was considered vulgar in the
eighteenth century as well, a variant of contempt, and decorum dictated
that it should be strictly regulated. In a letter to his son in 1748,
the moralist Lord Chesterfield proclaimed, “In my mind there is nothing
so illiberal and so ill-bred as audible laughter,” especially by virtue
of “the disagreeable noise that it makes, and the shocking distortion
of the face that it occasions.” In his Laocoön (1766), Gotthold
Lessing describes a portrait of the philosopher and libertine Julien
Offroy de La Mettrie, in which he is depicted as Democritus, or the
“laughing philosopher.” For Lessing, the philosopher’s gaping mouth is
a worrying stain; the laugh degenerates into a foppish and repulsive
grin, which fills him, he writes, with “disgust and horror.” In The Analysis of Beauty
(1753), William Hogarth complained, in a similar vein, that “excessive
laughter, oftener than any other, gives a sensible face a silly or
disagreeable look, as it is apt to form regular pain lines about the
mouth, like a parenthesis, which sometimes appears like crying.”

Nearly
half a millennium after Leonardo, contemporary scientists have
discovered a neurological explanation for the affinity between physical
expressions and emotional sensations of joy and grief. In the centuries
between, scientists took over where artists left off in urgently
pursuing the question. Charles Darwin notably fused the two approaches,
using the art of photography to further his scientific inquiry. In
order to formulate The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
with scientific veracity, Darwin broke with both schematic artistic
representations of the passions and aristocratic conventions preventing
extreme displays of emotion. He hoped to use photography to portray
emotional subtleties—like the close similarity between the laughing
and crying face—with a renewed realism.

Capturing particular
expressions, inherently transitory, volatile, and ephemeral, at first
seemed almost impossible with the long exposure time photography then
required. (Eadweard Muybridge had only just begun his experiments
recording sequences of a horse in motion the year Expression came
out.) Darwin described the spasms a laughing fit provoked, which would
have rendered any photograph a blur: “During excessive laughter the
whole body is often thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed.
The respiration is much disturbed; the head and face become gorged with
blood, with the veins distended; and the orbicular muscles are
spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Tears are freely
shed,” he noted, appending a key observation, “Hence . . . it is
scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tear-stained
face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a
bitter crying-fit.”­

Darwin found a ready-made solution to the
problem of how to capture raw expression in a set of extraordinary
pictures taken by the French doctor Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne and
reproduced in his book, Mécanismes de la physiognomie humaine
(1862). Duchenne practiced medicine at the Salpêtrière hospital, where
he embarked on an infamous series of experiments in an effort to
explain the workings of facial musculature. His process involved
administering a constant flow of electric current to human facial
muscles, which contorted the face into various expressions and held
them long enough for photographs to be taken.

Duchenne took as
his primary subject “an old, toothless man, with a thin face, whose
features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality
and whose facial expression was in perfect agreement with his
inoffensive character and his restricted intelligence.” The man
suffered from palsy, which paralyzed his face and made him impervious
to the pain of the electricity. Using his electrical devices, Duchenne
could “fake” emotions in his subject, activating and fixing expressions
without inflicting torture, as though he were, as he put it, “working
with a still irritable cadaver.” The results are disturbing; the use of
electrodes, and the hands that hold them in place toward the bottom of
the frame, create a distinct impression of sadism. Darwin must have
noted this, for in his book, the hands are only visible in the plates
depicting benign expressions such as the smile; indeed, for the picture
Darwin used to illustrate horror and agony, he instructed the engraver
to remove the menacing electrical apparatus and the hands that press it
to the skin.

In one of Duchenne’s pictures, which Darwin refers to but does not reproduce (Plate 48 of the Mécanismes),
Duchenne galvanized each side of his subject’s—or victim’s—face
with a different expression; one half is given a fake smile, the other
is made to weep. Duchenne’s intention was to show that the similarity
of the two expressions stemmed from the underlying musculature in the
marked naso-labial fold, which runs from the wings of the nostrils to
the corners of the mouth, wrinkling both cheeks, and which is a
characteristic of both the laughing and crying face. Darwin was
apparently less than impressed with the results of this particular
experiment: “Almost all those (viz. nineteen out of twenty-one persons)
to whom I showed the smiling half of the face instantly recognized the
expression,” Darwin wrote, “but, with respect to the other half, only
six persons out of twenty-one recognized it—that is, if we accept
such terms as ‘grief,’ ‘misery,’ ‘annoyance,’ as correct.”

Darwin
then turned to the Swedish photographer Oscar Rejlander, who taught
photography to Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll, to investigate
these similarities and differences for him. Rejlander was famous for
his large, allegorical photographs and self-portraits; he once
portrayed himself in a toga and with a leering grin as Democritus, the
laughing philosopher who had so offended Lessing. At the invitation of
Darwin, Rejlander posed for four photographs in Expression. He
even had his moustache trimmed so as not to obstruct the pantomimic
grimaces and decorous gestures he acted out for the camera. But his
most famous contribution was his picture of a screaming child, known as
Ginx’s Baby, illustrating the chapter on “Low spirits, anxiety,
grief, dejection, despair.” Rejlander sold 300,000 prints of this
photograph, which almost single-handedly kept his foundering studio
afloat.

In the Darwin archive at the University of Cambridge there is a photograph of Rejlander next to Ginx’s Baby.
It rests on an easel and by it sits the photographer, mimicking his
subject’s expression, his arm around the picture of the baby. Another,
almost identical picture appears alongside it, like a stereoscopic
slide. “Fun, only,” he wrote on the back of the photograph, “There I
laughed! Ha! Ha! Ha! Violently—In the other I cried—e, e, e, e,..
Yet how similar the expression.” It is almost impossible to tell them
apart.

Also in the Darwin archive is a slide produced by the
London Stereoscopic Company that depicts two sculptures by Adolph
Itasse of babies in bonnets, one crying, the other laughing. Normally,
a stereoscopic slide would contain two identical images, which would
create a 3-D effect when seen through the viewfinder. Here, however,
the two sculptures would appear superimposed, their expressions
blurring into each other. The composite image would flicker between the
two emotional extremes like a hologram.

***

Why would the uncanny similarity between the expressions of laughter
and crying have so intrigued Darwin? In short, it helped confirm his
theory of evolution. Darwin thought that monkeys, like humans, laughed.
In this, he disagreed with Aristotle, who claimed that humans were the
only creatures who laughed. Darwin’s purpose was to show that the
expressive facial muscles had evolved from animals and that therefore
man was not a separate, divinely created species. Duchenne kept a pet
monkey and reported to Darwin that he’d often seen it smile, but Darwin
relied on his own empirical experiments to argue that they laughed as
well. “If a young chimpanzee be tickled—the armpits are particularly
sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children—a more decided
chuckling or laughing sound is uttered,” Darwin wrote, “Young Orangs,
when tickled, likewise grin and make a chuckling sound and. . . their
eyes grow brighter.”

Along the way, however, Darwin noted that
apes didn’t shed any tears when they laughed. To prove that tears of
laughter were a definitively human feature, Darwin, a keen armchair
anthropologist, sent a questionnaire to a number of colonial
functionaries in the far outreaches of the British Empire asking
“whether tears are freely shed during excessive laughter by most of the
races of men.” The answer was affirmative. Sir Andrew Smith had seen
“the painted face of a Hottentot woman all furrowed with tears after a
fit of laughter”; Rajah C. Brooke reported that the Dyaks of Borneo had
an expression which meant “we nearly made tears from laughter”; and Mr.
Swinhoe informed him that the Chinese, more curiously, “when suffering
from deep grief, burst out into hysterical fits of laughter.”

Darwin’s
efforts to wring various emotions from our evolutionary forefathers
were tireless. As well as tickling apes under the armpits, he gave
snuff to chimpanzees to make them sneeze, made faces at orangutans, and
watched baboons recoil in horror from a stuffed snake. One such
experiment involved hiding a turtle under a heap of straw in London
Zoo’s monkey cage. Darwin was hoping to shock the monkeys, thereby
evoking expressions of astonishment or terror. The animal illustrator
Joseph Wolf, who Darwin claimed had “an eye like photographic paper,”
was on hand to record the results: “The Monkeys suspected something and
kept looking down from on high,” Wolf wrote in his memoir, “Clever
fellows! I shall never forget that. The keeper then retired, and
presently the heap of straw began to move. The turtle came out, and
instead of showing fear, the Monkeys crept nearer. The back-crested ape
came and looked at it, and walked in front of the turtle as it crept
under him. Finally he went and sat on the Turtle. Darwin was much
amused, and asked for a drawing of the incident.”

The sketch of the scene is illustrated in Expression as Cynopithecus niger, in a placid condition, and The same titillated by sitting on a crawling turtle.
The monkey who is riding the turtle is depicted with his impressive
crest of hair flattened back, and with the corners of his mouth drawn
backwards to reveal a frightening set of chattering teeth with which,
according to Darwin, he was making a “slight jabbering noise.” Only
“those familiar with the animal,” Darwin admitted, could be absolutely
sure he was not baring his teeth but grinning with happiness. Years
later Wolf added a skeptical note to his sketch: “I never believed the
fellow was laughing, although Darwin said he was.”

***

Five years ago, at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where Duchenne
had distorted faces with a galvanized rod, Professor Yves Agid
implanted an electrode into the brain of a 65-year-old woman in the
hope of discovering a cure for her Parkinson’s disease. The electric
current would sometimes alleviate her symptoms, but this time something
quite unexpected happened. A melancholy expression came over the
patient, her head slumped forward, and she tilted to the right. She
began sobbing uncontrollably. “I no longer wish to live, to see
anything, hear anything, feel anything,” she wept, “I'm fed up with
life.” With another flick of the switch her dark mood was immediately
lifted. She smiled and said apologetically, “What was all that about?”

In
Los Angeles, California, around the same time, another surgeon, Itzhak
Fried, inserted the tip of an electrode into the skull of a 16-year-old
girl to investigate her severe case of epilepsy. When a low voltage was
applied she began to smile. As it increased she started giggling, until
finally she fell about in paroxysms of laughter. “You guys are just so
funny,” she guffawed at the team of scientists in white lab coats, who
began to crack up too because her laughter was contagious.

By
poking about in this adolescent girl’s head, neuroscientists had
discovered, by mistake, what they called the “laughter center,” a piece
of the brain roughly one inch square, in which our sense of humor seems
to be located. The 65-year-old woman’s mind revealed what one might
term, by extension, the “crying center,” source of all our misery and
grief. It turns out these points abut each other in the left-frontal
lobe of the brain, and their close proximity provided neuroscientists
with a clue as to why laughing and crying are so interconnected.

Whereas
Darwin had sought to explain away the confluence in terms of excess
nervous energy—“It is probably due to the close similarity of the
spasmodic movements caused by these widely different emotions,” he
wrote, “that hysteric patients alternately cry and laugh with violence,
and that young children sometimes pass suddenly from the one to the
other state”—contemporary scientists have found an answer in the very
bedrock of the brain. Among the sources of their discovery is a rare
disorder known as Pathological Laughter and Crying (PLC), which was
first diagnosed in the early twentieth century. The condition
illustrates the jumble of the two emotions in startlingly graphic form:
patients suffering from PLC suddenly burst into Tourette’s-like fits of
giggles or tears.­

­
­

One
well-documented case of PLC is that of 51-year-old landscape gardener,
referred to simply as C.B. by his doctor, Antonio Damasio. C.B.
suffered a mild stroke in 1999 that damaged both his brainstem and the
cerebellum, which neurologists now believe controls ­the laughter and
crying centers, adjusting behavior to the appropriate context. As a
result, he’d laugh riotously in response to sad news and sob
irrepressibly in response to a joke—or, indeed, in response to
anything at all. A laughing fit would sometimes turn into a crying one,
but never vice versa, and the patient noted that after a long bout of
laughter or crying, he would eventually feel correspondingly jolly or
sad. Neuroscientists concluded that “feelings were being produced,
consonant with the emotional expression, and in the absence of any
appropriate stimulus.” In other words, one can manufacture or summon up
an emotion, much as an actor might, by assuming the desired expression.
If this is so, one can only imagine the internal pleasures or horrors
experienced, while scientists and philosophers preoccupied themselves
with the surface of things, by Duchenne’s paralyzed old man.

­

Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet and is currently writing a book,
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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